The time to stop Trump was in the 1990s, when the movement’s intellectuals were busy prostrating themselves before Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as they sought to remake the GOP into a party for white Christians. The time to stop Trump was during the George W. Bush administration, when Republicans swallowed the nonsense that deposing secular dictators was a great way to promote moderate Islam. The time to stop Trump was in 2009, when Sarah Palin was dumbing down conservatism into an alternative lifestyle that glorified anti-intellectualism. The time to stop Donald Trump was in 2013, when Ted Cruz was opportunistically telling Republican voters that obstreperousness was the equivalent of conservative philosophy.

Much as their blind loyalty discredited the Right, perhaps the worst effect of Limbaugh et al. has been their draining away of political energy from what might have been a much more worthwhile project: the fostering of a middlebrow conservatism. There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. It’s energizing and fun. What’s wrong is the impression fixed in the minds of too many Americans that conservatism is always lowbrow, an impression our enemies gleefully reinforce when the opportunity arises. Thus a liberal like E.J. Dionne can write, “The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity. … Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans.” Talk radio has contributed mightily to this development.

It does so by routinely descending into the ad hominem—Feminazis instead of feminism—and catering to reflex rather than thought. Where once conservatism had been about individualism, talk radio now rallies the mob. “Revolt against the masses?” asked Jeffrey Hart. “Limbaugh is the masses.”

In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar. Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right. But however much this dumbing down has damaged the conservative brand, it appeals to millions of Americans. McDonald’s profits rose 80 percent last year.

More:

I repeat: There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. Ideas must be marketed, and right-wing talk radio captures a big and useful market segment. However, if there is no thoughtful, rigorous presentation of conservative ideas, then conservatism by default becomes the raucous parochialism of Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, and company. That loses us a market segment at least as useful, if perhaps not as big.

Conservatives have never had, and never should have, a problem with elitism. Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right?

And now the barkiest carny of them all is going to be the GOP standard bearer this fall.

It’s interesting to contemplate who, and what, lost the Republican Party to Trump. Was it too much dependence on crude talk-radio populism? Yes, that was part of it. It was cringeworthy to listen to the way leading Republican politicians kowtowed to talk radio over the years. And not only politicians, but conservative public intellectuals too often ballyhooed radio talkers, or at least greatly tempered their criticism, probably because it made them feel connected to the People.

Was it a failure of intellectual leadership? I mean, was it the case that the party’s elites were incapable of admitting error and learning from their errors, and failed to come up with new ideas for a changing nation? Certainly that’s right.The No-Enemies-To-The-Right tribalism dominant in GOP circles in the 1990s and 2000s prevented any dissent from being taken seriously. The GOP leadership became bound to outdated dogmas, and remained deaf to the sources of discontent among their own voters. Trump has no ideas, only slogans, but his greatest asset is that he’s Not Them.

His greatest defect is that he’s Donald Trump.

You know what I would like to see in the comments thread? A dispassionate discussion of the Who Lost The GOP To Trump? topic. No shrieking, just plain talk. Please?

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 152 comments

152 Responses to Trump As GOP Comeuppance

A lot of points have already been addressed by Noah1972 and Glaivester and others. But I would just add: There seems to be an implicit assumption running through this that it is the duty of the GOP establishment to keep some sort of lid on the monsters that make up the GOP vote. This disgusts me.

This line of thinking, embraced by all manner of modern pharisees from the left to elite Republicans, is really really astonishing in the degree to which it worships power. “The disgusting rabble, what monsters! If it weren’t for their ignorance we could have had a nice orderly election between Jeb! and Hillary. But I guess that’s what the GOP deserves for appealing to those voters in the first place! How lowbrow!”

The answer to why Trump was successful in deposing these phonies is both implicit and obvious.

Reading the pharisee reaction to this year’s elections and the refusal to learn any lessons except the stupidest most self-flattering lies is sort of amazing.

The loss of the GOP to Trump reached its apotheosis with Palin/Cruz, but began during the time of… wait for it… Herbert Hoover and Al Smith.

Prohibition was the original social conservative crusade. In 28, the “wet” Al Smith might have lost big, but he won all ten of America’s largest cities, a harbinger of the urbanization of the Democratic Party.

Hoover might not have won “Yellow Dog” Democrats, but he set in motion a series of events that made them feel okay making common cause with the GOP under FDR. The “conservative coalition” yields Strom Thurmond, yields Jesse Helms, yields Newt Gingrich, etc. it’s a chain of events.

But I’m actually not asserting that social conservatism is the cause. It’s the effect. The defining feature of the south is populism, a “you’re not the boss of me” sense of obstinacy. As the party got southernized, the old Yankee values of thrift and communitarianism, and the old Yankee personality type best described as “flinty,” got subsumed under the southern values of individualism and a the personality type of George Wallace or George W. Bush (I mean swaggering, not necessarily racist, so far as Bush goes).

My general point is that evolution is slow, and you don’t see it while it happens, but if you zoom out, the picture comes into focus. The GOP has been slowly changing for four or five generations. No one person bears all responsibility.

The GOP has been selling a bill of goods over the past thirty six years, that raped the US economy and imploded the middle class for the benefit of a few self-interested globalist colletives. Never mind the enormous debt and deteriorating infrastructure left in their wake. Complicit and enabling of the policies that are systemically anti-European and destructive to cohesive family units being formed as a foundation for society.

If anyone lost the Republican Party it most certainly wasn’t the citizenry…

“Liberal control of broadcast and print media forced conservatives more and more into a bubble.”

Honest question: What’s the difference between a bubble and a subculture? Conservative dominance used to force gay people into a bubble and they got real institutions. They got John Waters and Divine, too. Which part of that was more effective? Was Divine a bubble but Barney Frank something else?

In other words… Is a bubble good or bad? I think it worked pretty well for the left. It bred militance. We act like that’s a horror. But it’s what got people to sue a cake bake. Which… Worked.

“The problem that led to Trump was that the GOP leadership feigned concerns for its base’s interests, and then refused to anything to deliver on them.”

This explains Trump taking over the GOP as a political institution. Thousands of voters, largely all those “independents who lean Republican (Gee I wonder why?)came out to vote for Trump because he was their vengance upon said leadership.

As for the “conservative movement” everything the author of the aforementioned piece in TAC wrote was also said by Austin Bramwell in TAC back in the aftermath of the 2006 election, the “movement” became prisoner of ideology just as Orwell had predicted and the “inner party” could do nothing except but continue to pour on the ideology to mask its own failures and were aided by those who were dependent upon its patronage. Talk radio didn’t start the Iraq War to be sure, but it didn’t prevent it either like it did the immigration bill. Thus, all are complicit from top to bottom since they all took their cues from each other, rarely acting in the best interests of the common good. Unfortunately so much ideology without success only led to such anger as to indulge those who the inner party allowed to operate in order to stoke that anger, never guessing one day they would become the party. A party and a movement which stopped thinking allowed itself to be taken over by one who doesn’t think either.

Rod has commented on how technology has changed journalism, especially the print media. The comment above regarding the fragmentation of mass media touches on part of that. The rise of talk radio offered an alternative to the consensus, but there’s something else to the fragmentation. Less recognized print magazines on both left and right became more accessible beyond coastal metropolitan regions. Think National Review, New Republic, Chronicles and the Nation. Even if they had a small readership, they offered an alternative. Same was true of the Economist. The NYT and WSJ supplemented local papers in the later 1980s. Then came the Financial Times, which now serves a national US readership, albeit a niche one The internet opened access to global media with the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mail reaching segments of a US readership with a very different media culture and perspective. Indeed, the Daily Mail has become a kind of samizdat for parts of the American right and the Telegraph was under Bill Clinton.

The conversation beneath the open or public conversation has reflected this in ways not completely understood.

In 1858 the common man would sit still and listen to Lincoln & Douglas debate the issues of the day. They’d do that for 4 hours. No matter whether farmer, banker, smithy or merchant, they were generally a literate people.

Who lost the GOP to Trump? Heck, who lost the Dems to Hillary? An illiterate people. Albert Jay Nock made an important distinction about literacy: being able to read is one thing … being able to read, grasp, comprehend, discern, debate & discuss – that’s REAL literacy. Our culture places little value on literacy; it’s been displaced by bogus education credentialing. (I suspect there’s a deep-state conspiracy behind that.)

We will rarely – very rarely – see virtuous public servants, because those potential candidates will never lower themselves to participate in the circus of soundbites & sloganeering, all of which are tailor-made for the ignorant. Ultimately I blame public education, and the parents who outsourced the stewardship of their children’s mind to the state.

It’s hard to say who bears responsibility, but the mechanics are clear to me. In their resistance to widespread social change, conservative leaders attacked the legitimacy of institutions that were traditional sources of information that any democracy relies on — education, science, an open press and government itself.

They have characterized education as insidious, science as silly, the press as false and government not “of the people, by the people and for the people” but as a foreign enemy. They have cultivated gullible voters by undermining the value of facts and evidence in understanding the world and making policy. And now these information-starved voters have gelled into a mindless bloc, looking for leadership and easily led by a demagogue with TV name recognition and a little grease. Enter Donald Trump.

The final blow has been the capitulation of party leaders who are so short-sighted that they are willing to sacrifice their personal integrity and the survival of their party in order to vote for anyone but Hillary. Instead of preserving the admirable values of the party in the temporary role of loyal opposition, they have chosen to vote for someone who shares none of their values and will destroy the Party of Lincoln, regardless of how the election turns out. And then there will be some wandering in the wilderness for conservatism for a while.

I chalk it up to a perfect storm of the internet, Sarah Palin, and a black man being president.

The internet allows conspiracy theories and hate speech to be disseminated widely. Sarah Palin kicked off the “real America” (ie, white, rural, Christan) stuff, paving the way for “Make America Great Again.” And having the first black president stirred up dormant racism.

My conservative family is for Trump. Makes me crazy. Their reasoning is entirely emotional, not rational. They know Trump can’t build a wall or kick all the Mexicans out. They just know that finally they can feel free to say all of the bigoted things they’ve had bottled up. One of my (male) relatives even wistfully said, “I remember when you could call a spic a spic”. Ugh.

Limited, conservative government is one thing. Complete and total incompetence coupled with arrogance is quite another. So, thanks to GW Bush, an inexperienced, 1st term Democratic Senator with an odd sounding name is convincingly elected President x 2. Now comes Hillary running against the guy who crunched more than a dozen GOPers. Karl Rove and GWB, may they both rest in peace.

I’m not a Republican, but I’ve been wondering what happened to the Republican party for at least a quarter of a century. Unfortunately, right now Trump doesn’t appear all that alien to the GOP to the rest of us. On the contrary. Aside from his personal problems (as a thin-skinned narcissist), he spouts all the usual Tea Party rhetoric we’ve been hearing from the Right for years. And somehow the Right and Republican politics became synonymous in most people’s minds around the time of Reagan. Since then, rightwing politics has simply gotten progressively extreme, especially after Obama was elected and the Republican Congress decided the usual compromising legislators do to keep the country up and running had to take a backseat to the ideological posturing sometimes referred to as “taking the country back.” Trump has been off point in only one area I can see, i.e., when he talks about the loss of American jobs due to outsourcing, but it only makes sense to go slightly rogue on that one matter this time around, considering that his opponent’s name is associated with NAFTA, a word that, when opposed, simultaneously screams Outsourcing, Offshoring and We Hate Mexicans, a sentiment the anti-immigrant Right owns, albeit sotte voce. If Romney hadn’t been associated with all three (being himself a major outsourcer who kept a good portion of his assets offshore in the Caymans, the fact that he lived his earliest years as a religious immigrant in Mexico added irony to too many ironies), he might have done the same.

I really don’t know why the party ever got so entangled in its right flank in the first place, considering how moderate to liberal — yes, liberal! — many leaders of the GOP were when I was younger. Back in the 60s, the John Birch Society, the most rightwing group around that didn’t wear swastikas or white hoods, was a joke; this year, both major GOP candidates (and Cruz to Trump spans about an inch of distance on the political map) sounded like Birchers to me. Republicans back then were not even necessarily conservatives. Many if not most of the biggest names in the GOP in my day were moderate to liberal, people like Nelson Rockefeller, Charles Percy, George Romney (ironically), Kenneth Keating, Jacob Javits, Edward Brooke (the first African American elected to the Senate), and John Lindsay. Ironically, it was a given that Rockefeller might have been the GOP standard bearer in the presidential election of 1964 had he not been divorced and remarried to a woman with children from a previous marriage, a fact that didn’t sit well with the conservative wing of the party, which didn’t hesitate 16 years later to run Ronald Reagan, who himself was known to be in the very same boat.

As an Oregonian, I like most of my fellow Democrats, always voted for Republican Mark Hatfield for the US Senate. Hatfield, a committed evangelical Christian, championed social safety net legislation and was one of the first and most outspoken critics of the Vietnam war. We likewise supported Republican Gov. Tom McCall, a committed environmentalist before such concerns became nationally known.
Voting back then really was a matter of picking the best person for the job. Party labels were secondary when voters were confronted by Strom Thurmond, a Democrat and segregationist, or William Fullbright, a pro-civil rights Southerner, and the first Republican to challenge Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign. The parties each had a spectrum of candidates to choose from, and compromise for the common good was a feasible alternative once the elected gathered to do the job they were elected to do. All we’ve got from these increasingly ideological politics the GOP has been playing (and largely by itself, at least for now) is gridlock and rhetoric. And Trump, despite his supposed lack of ideological commitment, embodies all the arrogance and extreme posturing we’ve gotten used to, which can give us nothing but more of the same.

Edit: In that last comment of mine, you can delete that “supposed” before “lack of ideological commitment” as a modifier to Trump. I don’t know what I was thinking, except that in his case, the ideology doesn’t matter since the extreme stuff he spouts is likely just Trump being Trump. For all that’s worth, i.e., not much.

A great deal has been well articulated about the GOP’s various actors and attitudes. But what I have not seen nearly enough writing about anywhere is what I consider to be the inextricable link between Donald Trump as persona and a pervading cultural temperament/appetite. More than ever, I believe, Americans vote on style over substance; and in Donald Trump they resonate with a style that suits their palate. Peter (in these comments 8pm 6/10) describes this when he writes:

“I don’t think it’s a ‘who’ that gave us Trump, so much as a ‘what.’ Our culture, politically and otherwise, has undergone dramatic changes in the past several decades. Some of those changes include a coarsening of media and discourse in general, the dominance of post-modernism among our culture-producing elite, and the subsequent subordination of rationality to emotion. Trump fits those changes like a glove.”

It’s this coarsening that has Americans turning to entertainment that ranges from Jerry Springeresque hysteria (e.g., Jersey Shore, Kardashian Reality Empire) to domesticated horror-violence, be it “Dexter” or the torture and bloody murder weekly presented from ABC’s Shondaland, to the existentially bleak “True Detective” or “Breaking Bad.” All the same and more can be found in film and music.

Our “news” media is not much better; and internet discourse has the tendency (present site excluded!) to sink to low, if not the lowest, common denominators.

The so-called “civility” of politics has long been an emperor with no clothes (I worked on Capitol Hill for years, I know this to be true)…perhaps, truth be told, politics has always been just as ugly behind the scenes as someone like Trump makes it seem from the podium.

And so, into this fray walks the embodiment of this loud, combative, shock-troop environment. Trump, in style, is a reflection of the American polity’s pervasive tastes. “Issues” aside, what has allowed for a personality like Donald Trump to rise to this level politically is that he’s not much different than what millions of Americans “consume” night in and night out (and this includes the well-educated elite who don’t even vote for him). What was described a few weeks ago in the writings about normative working class lifestyles (I couldn’t find the post, but it included someone’s description of working at a research lab and the mechanics he worked with) reinforces my point: pornography, sexism, racism, alcoholism… Ours is not a refined culture. Why is anyone shocked by the likes of Trump, especially given his freedom from Party financing, capturing popular attention?

Whether it is a kind of compartmentalizing and denial or utter ignorance or, worse, a faux display of being appalled, it would serve everyone, IMHO, to wake up and recognize the pot we were already boiling in.

You answered your own question: “the collective elite has agreed that those views are extremist and outside the bounds of acceptable dialogue.” It’s the elite that sets the limits, that decides which speech is allowed and which is taboo. And no, it kind of does have to be that way. Ask yourself why “mainstream Republican candidates don’t make that argument.” Because, however much approval it may win with voters, it is unacceptable to those who rule, to the unelected federal bureaucracy, the judiciary, the major media, elite academia, the true power centers, and who would thus bring those powers to bear to make their election highly unlikely, and if they do get elected, to ensure that while they take office, they do not take power.

What of this is really objectionable… to what should be the Republican establishment)?

What’s objectionable is the parts that will get you barred from the (metaphorical) Imperial Court, and if you want to have any real influence, you need access to the Imperial Court.

>>Andrew

But why must the Republican leaders be so quick to agree with a hostile media?

Well, what does one conclude when person or group A continually defers to, bows down to, submits to person or group B? That B is more powerful than A. Republican politicians submit to the “hostile media” because it and its backers and allies are stronger.

The GOP finally has someone willing to fight both the Democrats and the mainstream press. But the regular establishment leaders don’t want him.

They don’t want him because he is “willing to fight both the Democrats and the mainstream press”, because they know it’s a fight he, and they, cannot win.

>>Redbrick

lol does a party exist for its voters? Or do the voters exist to keep the party leaders in power and rich?

The latter, of course, and it’s always been so. Elites always rule, never the masses. And, no, elites pretty much never much “care what the plebs think.”

>>Siluan

The GOP is not now and has never been a philosophically conservative party.

When was the last time any place in the West had a political party that was both “philosophically conservative” and moderately electable? I’m pretty sure the US has never had one.

>>Devinicus

It’s as if the masters of the universe in the DC think tanks and on Capitol Hill are the real actors in the world and everybody else is just a pawn to be moved across the chess board. That’s never a good way to think about politics.

Actually, it seems to me to be pretty much the correct way to think about politics. Elites rule, and the masses are only ever footsoldiers (note that the word “pawn” derives from Late Latin pedonis, meaning “footsoldier”) for rival elites and proto-elites.

>>sjb

The Republicans were voted into majority in Congress in order to specifically stop a number of executive branch overreaches. Instead, they have acted timidly and seem to have been afraid to act for fear of charges of racism, bigotry, and so on. Voters lost confidence in them because they were afraid to act and didn’t keep their promises to the voters.

Well, what makes you think they ever could keep those promises? That executive “overreaches” could be stopped? And at least some of the lack of coherent defense is that Republicans share most of the same fundamental principles and axioms as their opponents, and it is those opponents whose view embodies those principles more thoroughly and consistently. Because, really, the Left more faithfully represents the liberal Enlightenment ideals of America’s founding, equality, the rejection of hierarchy, heredity and tradition, denial about the inevitability of religious conformity of the ruling elite, and so on, without the unpricipled exceptions poorly defended by the Right.

>>Glaivester

The problem that led to Trump was that the GOP leadership feigned concerns for its base’s interests, and then refused to anything to deliver on them.

If you think that the Republican Party was LOST to Trump, then you’re probably one of those “Establishment” or “Movement Conservatives” that the Republican Party voters REJECTED by nominating Trump.

The Republican Party was dead, a smaller and smaller party heading into obscurity, existing only because of rigid institution called the “Two Party System”, rejected by even the populace, since the most popular political affiliation is “Independent”, not R or D.

Ryan Booth: “I see lots of really dumb comments here so far. Ted Cruz was every bit as against illegal immigration as Trump. . . “

I think this and the remainder of your comment are right. Trump didn’t win because of any particular policy position even though there are many, many Republicans who agree with his policies. Those policies just aren’t that different from the positions of Cruz or Scott Walker’s positions.

Moreover, when we ask, “Why Trump?” we’re not asking why Trump’s policy positions prevailed. Instead, we’re really asking “How someone as crazy, offensive and undisciplined as Trump could win the presidential nomination of a major political party?”

You seem to blame epistemic closure first and foremost, but that only raises the questions of why Republicans (a) are more susceptible to epistemic closure than Democrats, and (b) why GOP epistemic closure produced someone like Trump, but Democratic epistemic closure hasn’t produced a nominee that is that crazy, offensive and undisciplined? For this reason, I don’t think epistemic closure is a sufficient answer.

I think a more likely explanation for Trump is the heavily gerrymandered Congressional districts that were drawn by GOP statehouses. Those Congressional maps ensure the GOP will remain not just a conservative party, but a very, very conservative party. Imagine what the Democratic party would look like if Maxine Waters circa 1996 was representative of the entire delegation. It would be extreme and disinclined to compromise with Republicans even when they offer something of value to Democratic constituencies. As a consequence, when other factions of the party want to advance legislation that may actually produce some good and stand a chance of getting enacted, the extremists stop it and even threaten a primary run against them.

The end result is that the entire party moves further to the extreme and the failure to enact an extremist agenda only engenders more anger and rage. Trump was the only candidate that offered rhetoric that resonated with that rage. Epistemic closure is certainly a compounding factor, but the only reason a single, extreme message is promulgated in the bubble is that the extremists in the party have the most power due to redistricting.

“Prohibition was the original social conservative crusade. In 28, the “wet” Al Smith might have lost big, but he won all ten of America’s largest cities, a harbinger of the urbanization of the Democratic Party”

——

There’s another interesting thing about the history of prohibition. It was very linked to the “issues” with the German Italian and Irish immigrants at the time.

The Germans were heavily associated with beer-making and the Italians wine. The religions of the immigarants, motly German Lutheran and the Catholic Church weren’t for prohibition, and the religions of the Protestants mostly were.

Many of the “problems” that prohibition was meant to solve was linked and identified with the undesirable habits of these immigrants, wasting away in their sinful and seedy saloons, most living in Cities. So accordingly there was also a city / country split between wets and dries.

bt: if you go back and read The Mauve Decade (wonderful book) by Thomas Beer, you will discover that the “wholesome rural vs. wicked city” trope was standard even back in the 1890s. And I’m sure if you poked around you’d discovered it’s typical no matter where or when in the Western world.

Yup, how are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?

I want to clarify and add to my point re Prohibition. I wasn’t identifying social conservatism as the path that led to Trump. It’s important to know there are socially liberal southerners and socially conservative northerners.

But populism is weaved into the fibers of the South’s story. (I keep harping on the South because it’s where Trump first exceeded “expectations” and because it’s the center of gravity of the modern GOP).

Maybe it’s a legacy of the privation experienced during Reconstruction, but the South has long had a since of “we must fight for what’s ours.” Huey Long was all about social welfare. Except for being a racist, Richard Russell fed nonstop at the defense budget trough, seeing it as stimulus for Georgia. George Wallace was practically an economic progressive (by the standards of the time) if you ignore standing in the schoolhouse door.

Draw a line connecting the dots and you get to Trump, whose greatest quality (to his supporters) is his willingness to “fight for us.” Whether it’s opposing free trade (naively thinking we can “keep” jobs here), political correctness (which in all but its most extreme form is just common-sense tact and politeness, but which some see as “taking away” free speech rights), or immigration (saving America for the “Americans,” which usually means those of northern and western European extraction).

I don’t know that the GOP was “lost” to Trump. And I’m not even sure I believe Trump is savvy enough to have perceived an opening and executed some master plan. I think the GOP has naturally evolved to a place where its base is simply responsive to what he’s preaching, which is that change, which believe means the loss of something, can be mitigated or even reversed. We can hold on to what’s ours (what’s familiar) if we fight. That sort of thing.

Who lost the GOP to Trump? Why, the GOP did, of course.
For generations, back as far as the Southern Strategy, the Republican Party has promised its base something that it had no intention of delivering and the base has had it. I know a lot of these folks, they’re part of my family. I don’t agree with them on cultural issues but I respect their views. They hate Paul Ryan and they hate Mitch McConnell, and they hate the Bush family. They’re sick of endless war and they’ve been hurt by globalization and they’re afraid of the cultural changes they can’t reverse. It’s bad enough Democrats treat them like ignorant racists (they’re nothing of the kind) but worse when the party of Reagan does the same.
Limbaugh? Hannity? Savage? Please. These guys are only in it for the money. If liberal talk paid more, Limbaugh would be farther to the left than Susan Sarandon. He probably voted for Obama, it boosts his ratings when a Dem is in the White House.

I think this and the remainder of your comment are right. Trump didn’t win because of any particular policy position even though there are many, many Republicans who agree with his policies. Those policies just aren’t that different from the positions of Cruz or Scott Walker’s positions.

(1) Trump was the only candidate to come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and to suggest that we were being victimized by bad trade deals. Yes, Cruz pivoted away from supporting Trade Promotion Authority for Obama, but he voted for it in the Senate up until the last vote or two.

(2) Trump made the immigration issue central to his campaign, which suggests that he really cared about it and did not look at it merely as a box to be checked off to satisfy voters. Trump gave immigration a higher priority than any other candidate, which frankly matters a lot.

(3) Many of the positions other candidates (by which I mean Ted Cruz and virtually no one else) took that were similar to Trump were taken as far as they were largely as a result of Trump’s success.

(4) The two favorite candidates in the race, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush had very different positions on immigration and trade than did Trump – Bush admitted it, and Rubio – well, his commitment to the Gang of Eight reveals his true position, whatever he might say on the campaign trail.

Moreover, when we ask, “Why Trump?” we’re not asking why Trump’s policy positions prevailed. Instead, we’re really asking “How someone as crazy, offensive and undisciplined as Trump could win the presidential nomination of a major political party?”

The answer is simple: because he talked about the things that concerned the voters, which the other candidates tried hard not to do.

You seem to blame epistemic closure first and foremost, but that only raises the questions of why Republicans (a) are more susceptible to epistemic closure than Democrats,

They most definitely are not. The difference is that when the Democrats achieve epistemic closure, the entire media culture imposes that closure on anyone else so that no one can question it.

Democratic positions on transgenderism, race not existing biologically, same-sex marriage, these all are issues on which they rapidly achieved epistemic closure. But they successfully managed to brand anyone who questioned them a bigot, so most people do not notice it.

and (b) why GOP epistemic closure produced someone like Trump, but Democratic epistemic closure hasn’t produced a nominee that is that crazy, offensive and undisciplined?

The media simply tends to excuse the faults of the Democratic nominee to a greater extent that they do the Republican nominee.

Imagine what the Democratic party would look like if Maxine Waters circa 1996 was representative of the entire delegation. It would be extreme and disinclined to compromise with Republicans even when they offer something of value to Democratic constituencies.

The Democrats by and large don’t compromise with Republicans. Take the Gang of Eight bill – the Democrats refused to put the enforcement before the legalization. Every “compromise” they offered was designed so that it could be rescinded or rendered impotent as soon as they got what they wanted. The Corker-Hoeven “compromise” was essentially Wimpy promising to pay for TWO hamburgers Tuesday for a hamburger today.

The end result is that the entire party moves further to the extreme

The Democratic Party’s position on sexuality issues is extreme, by the standards of ten or twenty years ago. Again, this is simply masked by the fact that they control so many levers of power to demonize dissent. Moreover, Obama essentially announcing the end of enforcing most immigration laws, his release of thousands of criminal illegal aliens into the United States – the Democratic Party DOES look like it would if Maxine Waters were representative of the entire delegation.

You, E. Potson, are the extremist. Trump is the only candidate to point this out.

I think a more likely explanation for Trump is the heavily gerrymandered Congressional districts that were drawn by GOP statehouses. Those Congressional maps ensure the GOP will remain not just a conservative party, but a very, very conservative party. Imagine what the Democratic party would look like if Maxine Waters circa 1996 was representative of the entire delegation. It would be extreme and disinclined to compromise with Republicans even when they offer something of value to Democratic constituencies. As a consequence, when other factions of the party want to advance legislation that may actually produce some good and stand a chance of getting enacted, the extremists stop it and even threaten a primary run against them.

This predicts a Cruz win, not a Trump win.

I’m going to double down on my comment that backward looking explanations are really rationalizations. The author of the article you mentioned clearly is interested in this as both a wonk and a partisan who dislikes the policy outcomes it generated. He is using this to rationalize a view of Trump as GOP extremism gone awry, when Trump really represents a realignment of conservatism entirely. Moreover his success going forward will have little to do with redistricting and everything to do with free media and the easy wins leftist overreach and Clinton’s unique talentlessness as a politician will give him.

It’s bad enough Democrats treat them like ignorant racists (they’re nothing of the kind) but worse when the party of Reagan does the same. Limbaugh? Hannity? Savage? Please. These guys are only in it for the money.

Any revival of the Democratic Party requires opening the door to some of these constituencies… It wouldn’t be hard to do if a handful of talking heads preoccupied with their own social-cultural fantasies would STFU.

Honest question: What’s the difference between a bubble and a subculture? Conservative dominance used to force gay people into a bubble and they got real institutions. They got John Waters and Divine, too. Which part of that was more effective? Was Divine a bubble but Barney Frank something else?

In other words… Is a bubble good or bad? I think it worked pretty well for the left. It bred militance. We act like that’s a horror. But it’s what got people to sue a cake bake. Which… Worked.

The difference between a bubble and a subculture is that a subculture does not reject the dominant reality. Yes, gay people settled into ghettos in the ’70s and ’80s. We had John Waters and Divine, drag and the leather and bear subcultures and all that. But we also still lived in the same world as everyone else. We watched the same TV shows, read the same papers, listened to the same music.

In other words, the subculture added to our understanding of the culture, but didn’t take anything away from it.

By contrast, a bubble substitutes itself for the larger reality in toto. Conservatives and liberals today cannot even agree on the same set of facts, even the ones that are directly observable and measurable.

For 50 years conservatives stoked all the worst populist instincts of their base, citing threats from lazy black welfare recipients, child-molesting gays, socialist bureaucrats, etc., in order to elect libertarian conservatives much more interested in cutting capital gains tax rates. They deliberately crafted gutter populism to further the interest of cynical capital. But those policies actively hurt the white working class (actually, the entire working class) and did nothing to stop the liberal cultural onslaught. In the end, the conservative elite gave their constituents nothing. Then along came Donald Trump, the genuine gutter populist. Most of the conservative base turned out not to be Reaganites after all, and flocked to him as someone perfectly expressing their instincts (since he’s little more than a grab bag of instincts himself).

The other half of the story is that liberals have done their best since the 60’s to openly dismiss and disdain the cultural sensibilities – both the admirable and the less so – of the white working class. And with the rise of Bill Clinton and the neo-liberals they even abandoned pro-working-class economic policies and embraced free trade and privatization. In effect, both conservatives and liberals have abandoned the white working class (and the broader working class) and Trump is the payback. In spades.

Forgive the plug, but I wrote about this on my own blog months ago. I even called it The Great Comeuppance.

I want to follow up my earlier comment. I previously laid the blame for Trump at the feet of a conservative philosophy that has debased formerly trusted institutions such as science, leaving a void for Donald Trump to fill. Today I read this New Yorker article that reprises a recent CalTech commencement speech. The title is: “The Mistrust of Science,” by surgeon and public-health researcher, Atul Gawande.

To be fair, he calls out both conservatives and liberals, but my own sense is that only in the conservative case has the political party joined with industry and religion to make anti-science an implicit core value. See if you agree.

The people who listened to Lincoln and Douglas were also state-schooled, albeit it in one-room schoolhouses with school marms. But education has always been the business of the state (sometimes with an assist from a state religion). The alternative to public education– in the general not individual sense– is an illiterate and ignorant population rather like medieval serfs. Please bear that in mind. There are many problems with our public schools, but the fact that they exist at all is emphatically not a problem. They are as necessary to our civilization as our sewers and water mains.

” . . ighted that they are willing to sacrifice their personal integrity and the survival of their party in order to vote for anyone but Hillary. Instead of preserving the admirable values of the party in the temporary role of loyal opposition . . .”

That you seem to think that Sec. Clinton espouses admirable values that demand one vote for her is a tad bit frightening.

Mamy think she espouses the worst traits of the political system. That is why they won’t vote for her.

It, alone, does predict a Cruz win and not a Trump win. However, my next paragraph explains why Trump won and Cruz did not. Trump’s rhetoric matched the base’s rage. Cruz’s did not.

This explanation is not intended to dismiss the influence of other attributes and failings the candidates have. For example, Trump is funny; Cruz is not. Trump is more likable than Cruz. Trump can claim business success as an executive; Cruz can’t. But, on policy (not rhetoric) the differences simply aren’t that stark.

This is, by the way, very similar to what occurred on the Democratic side. The policy differences between Sanders and Clinton are not that stark, but the rhetoric they employed differed quite a bit. Sanders’ rhetoric resonated with the anger that was present among a significant segment of the Democratic base – and that segment rejected Clinton. If the majority of the Democratic base had been as angry as the Sander’s bloc, Sanders would be the nominee.

Interestingly, for both the Democratic and the Republican primaries, when the candidates on each side did differ on policy, the angrier candidate favored policies that are not practical or capable of ever being implemented. Nevertheless, the impossibility (and contradictions) of Trump’s policies were not an impediment to his success. In fact, Glaivester and others here are arguing they were the main contributors to his success.

I’m arguing that the reason a majority of GOPers voted for extreme rhetoric along with impossible and contradictory policies is that the Overton window for GOP policy options has moved so far to the right that these people don’t recognize how unachievable their positions are. And, the reason the Overton window has moved that far to the right is that extreme gerrrymandering has produced politicians that are far more conservative than the average Republican not to mention the rest of the country. Those super-conservative politicians are pushing for super-conservative policies that stand no chance of ever getting enacted.

The inability or failure to enact those policies increases the anger among the base. Trump’s rhetoric matched that anger. Cruz’s rhetoric did not.

Note to moderator: I’m about to say something that is not politically correct so feel free to decline it. It won’t hurt my feelings.

The anti-intellectual culture. If someone’s argument against immigration is they can’t compete with high-school dropouts from Mexico who may not even know English… maybe the problem isn’t the immigrants.

“They deliberately crafted gutter populism to further the interest of cynical capital. But those policies actively hurt the white working class (actually, the entire working class) and did nothing to stop the liberal cultural onslaught.”

Yes, but the liberal cultural onslaught is what really did them in. Shattered families, the corruption of small towns by pornography, dope, the mainstreaming of perversity of all kinds, the soldiers among them sent off to fight wars for foreign interests and returning to PTSD and epidemic suicide, immigrants from God knows where pouring in by the tens of millions to compete with native born Americans for work and resources.

And the GOP wanted to talk about tax cuts for the rich and global corporations, sending more foreign aid to Israel, and putting Americans out of work by “making America a magnet for the best and brightest foreigners” (gag).

The more I read about how “GOP elites ignored the wishes of their base” the more I think “thank God”. I mean,: how would a political party look which adopted and explicitly advocated the bigoted, ignorant attitudes displayed by Donald Trump and some of his supporters? Would the evidently thoughtful people who contributed their comments here want to belong to that party? I wouldn’t, and I won’t. Because of what I have seen in this election, I am severing a 50-year affiliation with the GOP.

While Limgaugh, Hannity, Palin and their ilk give voice to the views of some (many?) Republicans, I doubt that talk show hosts can be considered thought leaders, because in most cases their adherents already held their views. What Limbaugh, Hannity, Palin,et al did do, however, is make it seem (to some)”respectable” to be bigoted and ignorant.

As has been pointed out ad nauseum by commentators there are many specific post hoc times when the Party lost their base. But in large part I think the Republican denial of science in favor of politics has been the fatal flaw. Tie a refusal to listen to those who are knowledgable about a field to the drive of the corperate elite to maximize income, and you have a party no longer beholden to facts.

In no short order you have a party that actively refuses to engage with reality.

1) Trickle down economics increases the prosperity of everyone, despite no evidence to this.
2) Free trade helps the poor, well perhaps the poor in other countries
3) Welfare mothers permanently game the system despite a mountain of evidence indicating that the working poor work longer harder hours but still can’t climb out of poverty
4) We don’t spend enough on the military, despite spending 50% or world wide defense funds
5) global warming is a hoax
6) homosexuals are all pedofiles
7) raising the minimum wage will hurt workers
8) death panels

The list goes on and on. Instead of having a political discourse we spend all our time simply correcting ‘facts’ that have no basis in reality. But these lies are good for the corporations so they get spread over and over again by politicians who either know better, or should.

In my eyes the Republical Party layed the ground work for Trump when it decided that the facts didn’t matter. And any lie told in the interest of winning another election was worth it. Because when politicians are no longer even giving passing concern with the truth, no policy, no matter how stupid, can sound good.

It, alone, does predict a Cruz win and not a Trump win. However, my next paragraph explains why Trump won and Cruz did not. Trump’s rhetoric matched the base’s rage. Cruz’s did not.

No, that just disregards the implications of the phenomenon entirely. Redistricting ratcheted up the influence of Republican anti-statism, as is described in the article. That is what Cruz represented, and if it were a force in this election at all, it would have benefited him. That they both played to “rage” is not at all a reason why it played into Trump’s hand, it is just assuming the consequent.

The core thing here is that the Republican base is realigning, and largely rejecting ideology in favor of an amorphous nationalism. Saying the base moved to the right is just not observant either, because in many ways Trump is also moving the party to the left, particularly by supporting infrastructure spending and taking various sorts of welfare reform off the table. Basically the ideology is imploding and being rebuilt.

Also the way people attribute this to rage is so simplistic. The reason such an extreme response is happening is because people perceive extreme amounts of risk building in the system. I listed these risks previously. Some people might respond to this as rage, but it is really a complex response to increases in risk.

Let’s be as simple as possible: if you were betting on the nomination process 5 months ago and thought the dominant force in Republican politics was a move to the right, you would have lost your shirt betting on Cruz. Don’t retroactively rehabilitate a losing explanation.

Saying the base moved to the right is just not observant either, because in many ways Trump is also moving the party to the left, particularly by supporting infrastructure spending and taking various sorts of welfare reform off the table.

You do realize that this is the very same base that nominated Mitt Romney for years ago and even now supports a candidate that opposes raising the minimum wage, opposes the Medicaid expansion, wants to loosen banking regulations and wants to give a $10 trillion tax cut to the richest people in the country? This is not about policy or moving to the right. It’s about (1) the predominance of anger as an animating factor in the Republican electorate, (2) the reason anger is the most influential factor, and (3) which candidate best related to that anger.

Also the way people attribute this to rage is so simplistic. The reason such an extreme response is happening is because people perceive extreme amounts of risk building in the system. I listed these risks previously. Some people might respond to this as rage, but it is really a complex response to increases in risk.

You seem to be arguing that because the rage is justified or rational it shouldn’t be characterized as actual rage and, therefore, Trump’s expression of it cannot, in fact, be an expression of rage. I’m not opining on whether the rage is rational or justified. I’m merely pointing out that it exists and that Trump’s rhetoric is the best expression of it.

“GOP elites ignored the wishes of their base” the more I think “thank God”. I mean,: how would a political party look which adopted and explicitly advocated the bigoted, ignorant attitudes displayed by Donald Trump and some of his supporters?

Secure borders. No more immigrants. Strong military but get our troops out of other people’s countries and stop fighting other people’s wars. Negotiate favorable trade deals. Punish companies that send jobs overseas or import foreign workers.

That’s a conventional, even traditional sort of nationalism. Not amorphous at all.

What’s “amorphous” is this bizarre and unwholesome globalist oatmeal served up by elites across the spectrum. “Shut up and let foreigners move into your home and take your jobs. Because we said so. You’re a racist if you don’t do it, but they’re not criminals if they’re here illegally. Also, we need you to go fight wars halfway round the world to get even with people who attack us because we’re backing their enemies for reasons that you don’t need to understand. You must accept these refugees because we destroyed their countries. But don’t worry, they don’t hate us enough to commit any terrorist acts here, except the ones they already committed or will commit for reasons you also don’t need to understand. Oh, and by the way, thanks for paying the salaries and bonuses of our friends in DC and Wall Street who broke the world economy. As soon as they’re making 1000 times more than the average American household again everything will be fine, whether or not you’re still working those part time jobs.”

“Trump is also moving the party to the left, particularly by supporting infrastructure spending”

AND

He’s promising the most huge tax cuts ever. And extra more war spending so we can start winning. So much winning.

When he goes on about winning, I am reminded of Charlie Sheen’s “Winning Rants”, it’s word salad. He is mostly just saying whatever any particular audience want to hear at any given moment.

There is no way for anyone to actually know what he would do if he were president – It’s a total shot in the dark because he’s an epic serial liar. His history in business mostly indicates that he is erratic, dishonest and unreliable, for what’s it’s worth.

The fact that there are conservatives and republicans who would vote for him says a lot about what they think about the state of the Republican Party and it’s leadership. Sad really.

What intellectual nonsense. The reason Mr. Trump is popular has nothing to do with epistemic cloture.

On the top is’t that the leadership capitulated on some many issues, embraces so many issues they sounded like democrats.

That’s it. That’s why most of the seventeen candidates were rejected.

What is disconcerting is that the so called reporting noted in the comments from formerly credible news and information sources all reflect the same complaints.

And that complaint is this. That most people who disagree with liberal, democratic and progressive advance must be:

1. out of touch with science.

2. bigots

3. uninformed idiots

4. simply out of touch with reality

This akin to simply name calling by setting up false arguments about what is believe argues and proceeding to beat them up. So that one can make the shallow false conclusions noted.

Side note but very important in understanding difference. The open ended form of discussion that liberals engage in was once called sophistry, And it is alive and well among liberals and democrats today.
Which is why the group most averse to science are liberals because t demands clear boundaries and objective realities. Because anyone who embraces science is going to reject claims that one’s psychological state reflects reality based on the evidence of one’s psychological state.

Hint, that used to referred to ‘circular reasoning’. And such reasoning lead to results not based on objective boundaries and guides. But if one reject boundaries and limits even as to the physical world, reality is always in a state of flux. Like the reality of near eastern and latin mystics. And truth — no such thing. Excuse the essential framing –

Calling another’s disagreement on issues as some kind of mental flaw is merely name calling as children do in the school yard.

For example, it’s like taking one aspect say trickle down as the economic policy of republicans when in fact, that was not the policy. That was to be the result of a policy that was never fully implemented. There was no trickle down economic, that was an abbreviated catch phrase. But why bother with those objective structure when name call is convenient.

Tighter border control say building a wall a very practical attempt to manage border security — ah those bigots.

When the children have the sources of for news and information outlets, I guess one should expect childish content.

The problem is not Rush Limbaugh, or Hannity, or Savage, or Sarah Palin. The problem is the GOP elites and business class lost touch with middle American voters. They lost the ability to craft a message and agenda that speaks to common sense America. Reagan introduced a more “folksy” and common sense image to America and so did George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. This is a good image and in most cases, common sense is what is needed to solve problems. The GOP elite lost touch. Some examples of this are the evidence documented in Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart”. Another example is when a number of GOP elites and columnists were mesmerized in 2008 by Obama’s speaking style and pressed suits, etc… Or how about the GOP leaders and business class with core knowledge curriculum and the proposed federal take-over of school curriculum. Or the fact that Wall Street leaders have not had enough public humiliation and jail time for the financial crises they caused in 2008. Or the latest failure of the government leaders ignoring the water quality in Flint and failing their duties. The GOP elites and GOP leaders ( and also Democrat leaders ) have separated from the rest of America and they are responsible for the great comeuppance.

Keep in mind the Democrat party has their own issues of comeuppance with Sanders doing so well in the primaries and it surprised them. My point being there is a large uprising against elites in the Democrat and Republican parties.

Reagan spoke much about common sense and ordinary citizens and I quote from him:
“… I am not a politician. I am an ordinary citizen… and it’s high time that more ordinary citizens brought the fresh air of common sense to bear on these problems.”

You seem to be arguing that because the rage is justified or rational it shouldn’t be characterized as actual rage and, therefore, Trump’s expression of it cannot, in fact, be an expression of rage. I’m not opining on whether the rage is rational or justified. I’m merely pointing out that it exists and that Trump’s rhetoric is the best expression of it.

No I’m saying you have no basis to assume it is rage specifically, just that it is perception of risk. That manifests very differently in different people. A lot of people are not really angry in any psychologically meaningful sense (look at videos of interviews of Trump supporters, they are not rage boys), and if you want to psychologize the phenomenon like this, you need to confront the extreme paucity of empirical evidence in support of that claim.